Passing Strangers

I’m inclined to take it as evidence for the continuing collapse of Twitter as a workable platform for intellectual exchange and communication – yes, I’m still naive enough to try to use it for that purpose – that I’ve only just heard of the death of Dan Tompkins, about four days after everyone else. Well, for specialised values of ‘everyone else’; as these tributes make clear, much of Dan’s career was devoted to teaching and service at a single university rather than extensive publication or reputation-building. I guess he may have been one of those people whom everyone nevertheless knew from professional conferences in the US [side note; it was very weird to attend the UK Ancient Historians’ annual meeting, aka the Baynes meeting, for the first time in a few years, and not see either Jane Gardner or Peter Rhodes], but I imagine – I do have a fairly terrible sense of these things – that he wasn’t especially well known in the UK.

My relationship with him was almost entirely electronic; we certainly met in person once, when he came to a Reception-of-Thucydides workshop I organised in conjunction with the APSA annual conference in Washington in 2010, and maybe another time I don’t remember, and plans to meet up in the US when I was hoping to organise a mini-lecture tour combined with visiting wife’s family fell apart because of the plague. But we corresponded regularly by email; obviously he was the person to go to for discussions of M.I. Finley, and he would regularly get in touch with comments and questions about Thucydides and his reception, maybe once a year or so, and I ended up on a sort of mailing list for his random thoughts (and now feel sad and ashamed that I didn’t respond more extensively and regularly – life gets in the way, you assume there will always be a next time).

What has really left me in a rather shaken state is that this is my second death of the morning: I heard from a mutual friend of the passing, far far too young (I don’t know if he was yet forty), of Dimitri Almeida, Professor of Inter- and Transcultural Studies at Halle. We never met at all, but I feel genuinely bereft. I first encountered Dimitri’s work on the French far right when researching my piece on the Politics of Decadence for the Oxford Handbook of Decadence; he’d written an article on decadence as a trope of the Front Nationale – which cited an article of mine from a decade or so earlier. It was this that first persuaded me that there was serious potential in expanding the topic into a full-blown research project; we corresponded and chatted, he participated in some online workshops I organised, and we developed a joint funding proposal (unsuccessful, but a really great collaborative experience).

As recently as March we were discussing next steps, when he said that because his prognosis wasn’t looking great, he’d better put things on hold rather than risk dying in the middle of a project and creating great inconvenience. Which just seems to confirm what a great collaborator he could have been, and I can only imagine the conversations that might have taken place. Damn.